A blog about making model trains, little boats and both real and model automobiles. Typed by someone with painty hands, oil under his fingernails and the smell of solder in his nostrils.

Tuesday, June 12, 2012

Deck clamping

Over on the Canberra, I'm putting the pre-painted decks in place.

The kit is showing its age again with some bizarre break lines between parts. At the front, areas that should be flat have join lines in the middle of them that will be difficult to hide - all I can hope to do is minimise their impact.

My technique is to apply plastic cement and let the plastic soften a little. Then the parts are clamped together and prodded around to align them. This way, the soft plastic tentatively holds it's neighbouring part so they stay in the same plane.

The clamps shove the two parts together firmly and once dry, there are no gaps so I'm saved the hassle of filler work, quite a relief.

At the back end, the curved balconies are fixed, they just need tidying up to look like solid pieces of metal.

Vertical alignment between the two halves of the hull isn't perfect but with a bit of minor jiggling the decks appear to be in the right place with any errors hidden. We're talking fractions of a mm here so it's not difficult.

What IS a challenge is to pin down the colours. The pool surround should be brown it appears so I'll have to fix that but other work can now carry on while the paint dries.

1 comment:

I reemeber seing this ship coming up Southampton water 30 years ago looking very tatty on its return from the Faulkland's conflict where it had been used as a tropp carrier. I'll scann off the negs when I get a chance, very topical!